Digital surveillance and recording systems are designed to provide digital management of video for security and monitoring applications. These systems are required to support multiple sites, multiple users and viewers, and to comply with a variety of storage architectures. Such systems should be flexible and scalable, in order to be able to grow as actual requirements grow.
Flexibility and scalability requirements are also a result of previous investments of organizations in other systems, which include computational processing power and networking infrastructure. In addition, these other systems may reflect other needs for recording media data, such as audio data for example. Thus, a number of different factors may influence both past and future purchasing and installation decisions for equipment (hardware and/or software, and/or other types of infrastructure) for monitoring and/or recording media data.
Many companies begin with the basic function of digital voice capture, recording and management to enable them to record the telephone and voice communications that occur during regular interactions of workers of the company. As digital voice recording and its benefits are assimilated within the organizations' operations, many look for additional areas where digital recording can further improve their business and operational processes.
Digital recording of other media, such as video, is increasingly being sought. However, adding the capabilities for recording a second type of media, such as video data, to an existing recording and/or monitoring system for a first, single type of media, such as audio for example, is currently not a simple task. For example, an organization may turn to the suppliers of digital voice recording solutions, in an attempt to obtain the additional functionality as an “upgrade” to their existing or upcoming digital voice recording systems, for commonality, logistics and cost savings reasons. However, such additional functionality can typically only be obtained by purchasing a complete system for monitoring and/or recording digital video data, which must then be added to the previously existing complete system for monitoring and/or recording digital voice data. Thus, currently available systems are merely additive in nature, as the two systems typically function separately, such that no advantage is obtained from having capabilities from recording and/or monitoring two different types of video data.
An additional problem of currently available systems for recording multiple different types of media is scalability. The requirement of adding more products and systems to fulfill the requirements of recording multimedia data clearly leads to many other practical, technical and logistical problems. For example, such requirements usually result in additional hardware, servers, applications, maintenance, and so forth. Issues of commonality, real estate and cost effectiveness become lost, since existing voice recording platforms cannot currently be used for the new multi-media recording needs.
However, problems of scalability are not limited to systems to which multimedia recording and/or monitoring functionality are added as an “upgrade”. For example, currently available digital video recording systems also lack true scalability. Existing digital video recording systems are basically self-contained units, with the capacity of acquiring and recording a fixed number of video feeds. Such a formation is limited in capacity and expendability, whereas as an overall architecture, it maintains a unit-centric behavior requiring users and administrators to interact with each unit individually.
When the internal storage capacity becomes insufficient, most units are incapable of attaching archiving devices beyond the physical containment of the unit's chassis. Furthermore, these archiving devices must be pre-certified by the manufacturer, crippling the ability to exploit advancements in storage technology.
Furthermore, the channel capacity of a recording unit is typically limited by the amount of preinstalled inputs. When the need arises for additional video cameras to be recorded or viewed, an additional unit has to be installed. As mentioned earlier, this requires the operator of the system to interact with yet another unit, adding complexity and inefficiency to the whole process.
The architecture of existing systems does not provide for a robust central storage configuration. Such a configuration is mostly required in a multi-site installation, where video information should be recorded in the head office, for centralization or for disaster recovery reasons.
Another limitation is the ability to support a large number of simultaneous viewers. Most existing systems are designed to handle up to a dozen users. New systems are required to provide access for live and archived video for viewers from multiple locations, and in growing numbers.
The cumulative result of these limitations is a cumbersome architecture with limited and rigid scalability. These limitations further lead to an expensive and complex upgrade path, causing the task of expending a system's configuration to become costly and inefficient.